The man, Moses, who stood before God face to face at Mount Sinai surrounded by His splendour, later on prayed a prayer, "Show me Your glory." God's glory is a fascinating thing to consider. We have our human views regarding this word. To us it often represents something extremely bright, noticeable, loud, fascinating and glittery. It may astound many to know that that is not how God presents His glory in the Bible. That is the reason the religious world so easily misses God. Moses was expecting to see something beyond the humanly glorious. Or shall we say something different than the humanly glorious? Let us consider some specific clues about this concept from the Bible : It is found in the earthen vessels (2 Corinthians 4:7). We would look for the golden ones.
There is the Glory of God in tribulations (Romans 5:3). Humanity thinks prosperity is glory. Paul boldly found it in his infirmities (2 Corinthians 12:10). We often hate those. Don't we?</p>
Glory in the cross - When Jesus started talking about going to the Cross to His disciples, He wasn't so much focused on the pain or the sacrifice, He spoke in terms of being glorified by His Father. Humility shines in God's perspective. Cross is glorious. Jesus' face was marred on the Cross, to the extent that no beauty was there to behold, but in God's eyes it was restoration of the glory. In John 17:5, He prayed, "And now, O Father, You glorify me with Your own self with the glory which I had with You before the world was."
We tend to think that the it is something that would be attractive and amazing. However, in the Old Testament Exodus, glory on the face of Moses made children of Israel to fear and draw away from him. They pleaded him to put a veil on his face in order to avoid it. In Exodus 33, God's Glory was shown to Moses from the backside.When the three apostles were taken to Mount Transfiguration and were witnessing the Glory of Jesus Himself, we see Peter attempting the work of making tabernacles. That is man's response to the Supreme Shine. Man sees glory in works and performance and production. However, God's glory is in His rest (Isaiah 11:10, 63:14).
God invests His Glory in man. He made us in His own image. He transforms us unto glory (2 Corinthians 3:18) C S. Lewis said, “There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously - no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption.”
There is also the Glory that makes unclean and undone. In Isaiah 6, the prophet saw the vision of the glory of God. We really do not understand how that glory appeared. We see a group of angels covering there face and crying, "Holy, Holy, Holy!" This seems very different than the children of Israel who instead tried to cover Moses' face. Pharisees would have done well to learn that lesson. In the Ultimate Presence, instead of the amazing, Isaiah saw his unclean lips.
Finally, the Bible speaks about it in context of the everyday details of life. We can see it in our lives. In 1 Corinthians 10:31, Apostle Paul encourages another way of living. We can eat, drink and do everything else to the glory of God. We can meet God in the beggar on the street, in a visit to the sick, in smiles of the children, in the orange sunsets, in the cup of cold water, and in many other ordinary looking places. At strange, common places looking at an unusual Saviour, we are called to encounter the glory of God.
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